"Write down where the instrument fails." – first rule of the Bureau's discipline of impossible geography
THE GATE BOOK OF SCHARTE Memorandum of the Bureau's surveyor at Scharte, copied into the Book at her request so that every officer may read it in the hour before the number, since none of them reads it after. TO THE OFFICER OF THE NIGHT. You will be asked at dusk, by me, what you will do if the number is zero. I ask every officer and have two thousand answers and no conclusion that I will share. I ask so that there is a record of what strangers intend before they have seen the road. This memorandum is the rest of what I know, which is little. The pass is a saddle between two peaks, visible from the gate only in the grey before first light, as a notch of sky. By day it is in cloud. I have been at it six years with the Bureau's instruments, a theodolite, barometers, a chain, and the first rule of my discipline, which is to write down where the instrument fails. It fails two hundred paces below the saddle. Not gradually. A barometer carried past the last stake reads nothing; carried bac...
From the lore of The Last Pass.